


That One Time Bruce Wayne and Jason Todd Had a Heart-to-Heart by Accident

by n7s



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types
Genre: One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-28
Updated: 2016-09-28
Packaged: 2018-08-18 09:58:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8158085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/n7s/pseuds/n7s





	

"If you wanted to watch the game with me, you could've just invited me to the manor," Jason says as he opens the door to the bar. Better food, less drama, and more comfortable seats make Gotham Knights on the 200" batscreen more real and enjoyable than actually being at the stadium. There's something to be said about the occasional bat flying past your head, but you get used to it. The alternative is some greasy guy's saliva sprayed all over your hair while he's screaming to some player to stop dragging his feet.

It's chilly this close to the harbor despite May being nearly over, and the heat inside the bar is widely welcomed by everyone. The low lights and the smoke make the atmosphere intoxicating and heavy, as if time's working slower here and, by usual Gotham standards, this is still the cleanest bar in a ten-mile radius. _Ugly Duck_ has always been known for holding important drug cartel talks with various big names around Gotham, but it feels way too normal right now. There's a group of teenagers lazily playing pool in the far corner, a family with two very young kids eating at the booths, the group of guys sitting along the bar concentrating on the match, minding their own business. The bar's owner had a recent run-in with a certain dark vigilante roaming the streets of the city the past few decades so instead of getting jail time, he was now a mole. Keep allowing dirtbags to do their business in the back rooms and then let Batman know so he can appear and kick their ass seven days to Sunday. 

"Matches Malone doesn't have a manor," Bruce reminds him, following the young man inside. As he passes by the glassy entrance, his face entirely different than what it looks like in reality, he checks the reflection to see if anyone's following them. A mustache is covering his entire upper lip, sunglasses are eating up more than half of his face, brown hair's slicked back, combed to perfection and connected to thick sideburns. Even if someone _were_ casing them, Jason thinks momentarily, it'd be the fashion police. 

"Right. Matches." Jason makes a bare effort to lower his voice as he nears the rowdy people sitting at the lined-up bar stools, commenting on the screens overhead. "How come I can see you?"

"Upgraded the automatic exception list software." 

"So your nano-batbots recognized me?" He grabs the guy sitting next to the only empty seat and effortlessly throws him away before sitting down, leaving the other chair for Bruce. "That's almost sentimental of you, Malone." 

"Jason," Bruce warns, the drunk guy a few feet from them cursing, hiccuping, then walking away with a lazy move of his hand that says _these guys aren't beer_ and finally disappearing out of the door, _not_ before he nearly stumbles over his own two feet. 

"What? He was leaving." 

The upcoming reply is cut off by two unordered beers appearing swiftly in front of both of them by a very bored barman that's been blindly doing the same movements the entire night. Charles Freeman, also the owner of this place, wouldn't recognize either Bruce Wayne or Matches Malone, but Bruce still instinctively turns his head away. There's comfort in wearing a mask that actively hides your face instead of weightless bots that can morph into whomever you want. Charles walks away anyway, predictably not saying anything or shooting either of them a second glance, and unpacks a wooden crate of glasses. 

"This on the house?" Jason asks after him.

"If on the house is short for _I will pay every cent before going_ , then yeah, buddy, go wild," Freeman responds indifferently, picking up a dirty towel on his way to more blind serving.

Bruce moves his bottle to the side and surveys the entire room before taking off his sunglasses, revealing deep brown eyes instead of bright blue. He notes the family with the two kids, adding one more reason why this has to go smoothly. "Keep your guard up." 

"Would make it easier on my guard if I knew what I was doing here." 

"The intel on the southeast cartel unit came through—" 

Jason makes a disapproving noise as he downs more than half of his beer in one move. "Let's rephrase: will I get to shoot someone?" 

Bruce pauses at the interruption. "Preferably not." 

The wording makes Jason smile. "Ideally, yes." 

" _Matches_ ," Bruce stresses the name, "just needs a bodyguard." 

"Well, this bodyguard is packing, so good on Matches for being sensible and hiring a bodyguard willing to do some damage." 

"This isn't—" 

"You would've brought along the poster boy if you didn't want me to use my lethal charms." 

"You haven't killed anyone in more than a year, Jason," Bruce points out, his voice a bit more tired that expected. 

"Nice. You keeping tabs on me?" 

"You ever expected I wouldn't?" 

Something happens on the TV and everyone just loses it with shouts that hold zero coherence but pack a lot of enthusiasm. The toddlers from the booths have climbed on their seats to watch the game more easily, pointing at colorful things on the screen that catch their interest from their table as their parents have started arguing about something that seems more important than their dinner or children's safety right now. The kids have learnt how to tune it out. Bruce has already three plans in place in case their seats topple and hit the ground. They _won't_ hit the ground. 

"Speaking of Dick," Jason mutters. "I haven't heard from him in a while." 

"He had to go radio silent. He's been dealing with some… things from the past." 

"On his own?" 

Bruce fleetingly eyes him. "He can take care of himself without my help." 

Jason nods more nonchalantly than he normally would. "That's nice." 

"Something on your mind, Jason?" It must be the moustache and the lack of lighting playing tricks, because there's almost a smile under that hairy caterpillar. 

"Just thinking about how you and Dick have always been close." It sounds like a half-finished question to his ears, but he doesn't think it is. 

Bruce pauses before answering. "Yes. He's been there from the start." 

"I always thought it made zero sense I never felt any need to be like Dick. I _was_ , once upon a time, and pretty damn close without really knowing it back then, but I never felt pressured to be. Even though maybe I should have, now that I think about it." 

Bruce opens his mouth, the conversation having taken a completely different turn, but Jason stops him. 

"My point is he left you. It was his decision, he acted on it and despite everything, you respected it at the end." 

"He had to be his own person sooner or later. He wanted to."

"That's not where I'm getting at. Whoever came after him should've been the replacement, yet I never felt like that. I looked up to him and thought of him as a brother. Weird, see-you-every-six-months-if-Gotham's-in-shambles brother but he was family. We were family. And then came Tim." 

Jason expects total silence, almost _craves_ to drown in the background noise of people talking and laughing and commenting on the overhead game, but apparently he doesn't get that tonight. 

"Tim didn't come right after though, did he?" 

It hits Jason he's never really had a conversation with Bruce Wayne in many, many years. It was always Batman staring back at him and it was maybe easier that way. Batman had to always keep it together, no small mannerisms to decode, no absence of a fatherly smile so no reason to _notice_ when he wasn't warm to Red Hood. But now Batman isn't here, and if he's here he's the one hiding behind Bruce Wayne, and it's a whole new world for thirteen-year-old Robin. Because he realizes he's bitter. He realizes if he had survived the warehouse and that mad clown, if he had opened his eyes in a bed instead of a coffin, maybe he'd still turn out the way he had today. Maybe dying didn't change him, maybe it was always in his genes to want revenge. Maybe it was coded into him for things he needed to be taken away from him. 

Maybe, sooner or later, Bruce would have stopped wanting him as a son anyway. 

Jason stays silent for a bit, examining the beer bottle in his hands, water beads running down the glassy edges. "Alfred once asked me why I'm always angry. It was a stressful day for everyone and I was only making his day worse by being a wiseass, so I guess he just couldn't hold it in at that point. He asked me why I'm always angry and I said, _"It's part of my vibrant personality"_ , so he just left the cave. He left. And I would probably give him the same answer now, I honestly would, knowing me. But the thing is—the answer is: I'm not. I should be, but I'm not. Not anymore." One more water trail before he adds, "But do I regret wanting to kill you back then? No. I don't." 

"Jason—" 

"No, you need to hear that. You hurt me." 

The expected silence finally sets in and it's ironically not enough now. You either break this thing open or you keep your mouth shut until everyone's okay again with pretending certain things didn't happen the way they did. And damn this bar, this seat, this sickening beer, it is now broken. The reckless Robin after all. Might as well live up to that. 

"You know you can hurt people and that is one of the reasons you have to strategically keep your distance or, you know, whatever it is you tell yourself every night to stay detached. But you never really wrapped your head around the fact you _actually_ hurt me. It happened. It wasn't an _if_ situation." He turns to look at him. "Batman wasn't prepared for that."

Bruce barely makes an effort to see if anyone's listening in to their conversation, people's loud voices covering most of the words anyway, and it's so unlike him it's nearly striking for Jason to notice. 

"Revenge on the Joker, killing him. It's not what I—what Batman does." He doesn't budge his stare. "Batman doesn't kill. Batman _can't_ kill." 

"Yeah, and good on him too, whatever good that's done him," Jason smiles sarcastically. "But I'm talking about Drake." 

"Tim." 

"It's borderline funny how I was having second thoughts? Back then, I mean," he continues grinning. "Even when I found out the Joker was still running around spreading his clown bacteria and infecting the city, killing people and not being held accountable. I didn't decide anything until I saw _him_ with you. The new protégé. Here's to Batman's new sidekick," he lifts his beer in mock celebration just as Gotham Knights score and the bar roars with praises again. "Those were some good candids on the papers. Great smiles." 

"It's not that simple, Jason. Tim has been invaluable, he helped in more ways I can express in one night. If Batman needs a robin, he needed _that_ robin more than ever after everything that happened. After everything that was lost. I didn't trade you in for someone else. You're not expendable. You never were." 

 _I just wasn't there_ , Jason wants to say. "I'm not blaming him," he says instead.  He rubs his eyes, a sense of weariness covering him. "Personal growth and all that. Would I have minded if he was caught in a blast? Probably not. I do now, but not back then. It's not Tim's fault. He's too damn resourceful not to have eventually found himself here." He takes a sip from the almost empty beer and it makes him want to throw up. "Doesn't mean it didn't hurt like a bitch seeing the next bat cannon fodder in line." 

"None of you were—none of you _are_ cannon fodder. Casualties happen, Jason. You should know that the best out of every Robin. This is a war and I try my damnest—" 

" _You lost a son_." 

So now the beer is empty and the water driblets are all gone but not _all_ driblets are gone. Not all of them are found on beer bottles either. Some threaten to fall on angry, heated skin but he pretends it's dark enough here for Batman himself, trained to see perfectly under every lighting condition, not to notice this. 

"We're not just a casualty in your fucking war," he breathes. "We're your sons." 

They stare at each other as Bruce's entire stance changes. From frigid, perfect control, he almost becomes the same person as everyone in the room. Plain. Uncharismatic. Imperfect sitting not promoting ideals and wealth and discipline. Ironically, it's how Matches Malone should probably sit in the first place. 

"I know," he says in a lower voice. "I know." 

"I know you do," Jason mimics the tone. "But it doesn't matter much at this point." 

Gotham Knights have just scored for a final time and won by a thin margin. The two kids are making faces at Matches, pretending their indexes are their very own mustaches. The celebrations and wild shouts around the bar drown out those who want to be drowned and the rest is history for another night.


End file.
